Chabad - Lubavitcher Rebbe & Rav Hutner

From Hillel Goldberg’s Between Berlin and Slobodka published 1989

[Page 79]

From Rabbi Schneerson’s arrival in America in 1941 until he became the Lubavitcher Rebbe in 1950, he and Rabbi Hutner maintained an intimate havruta, or fixed time for joint study. Decades later, when Rabbi Hutner lay on his deathbed, the Lubavitcher Rebbe had his physician phone from the United States to Israel regularly to inquire about Rabbi Hutner’s condition. But all this could not obscure a clear breach. Rabbi Hutner relentless1y sustained a biting critique of the Lubavitcher movement on a number of grounds. 41

All three prodigies who met in Berlin in 1929-Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Isaac Hutner, Menahem Schneerson-sustained a self-image so powerful and a certitude so unqualified that there could be no room for even delicate criticism among them as they each developed mutually exclusive kingdoms, so to speak: modern, secular-talmudic philosophic synthesis for Rabbi Soloveitchik; a worldwide Hasidic Inovement for the Lubavitcher Rebbe; and an elite, talmudic-pietistic training center for Rabbi Hutner. In their divergence, the larger problem they embody is the elusiveness of an affirmative definition of modern Orthodox Judaism. There was no disagreement, however, on what it was not. Rabbi Hutner demonstrated this most poignantly, going beyond biting disagreement, to definitive rebuke, in his attitude toward Abraham Joshua Heschel.

[page 187.]

41. Rabbi Hutner’s opposition to Lubavitch came to expression with colorful asperity. For example (interview with Saul [pseudonym], January, 1985, Jerusalem):

I was a student at Mesivta Chaim Berlin for only half a year, and had not spoken to Rabbi Hutner in about twenty years. I phoned him in New York, saying only “hello,” to which he responded, “Hello, Saul, how are you?” He knew my voice! He had this habit of making appointments at strange times, so we met at 2:10 p. m., Sunday afternoon. I told him that I had come to New York to pick up my children from a summer camp—a Lubavitch camp. Whereupon he suddenly turned his whole body around in his chair, his back facing me, and just sat there in blazing anger, glaring into space for what seemed to be an eternity. He must have been silent for two minutes. I was dumbfounded. Then he said, “Saul, you come to see me once in twenty years, and all you can tell me is that you send your children to a Lubavitch camp? There aren’t enough other camps? He said that my children would return home saying that the Lubavitcher Rebbe was the Messiah, that Lubavitch would ruin my children.

Rabbi Hutner was opposed to the personality cult built up around the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and to the public projection of both the Rebbe and the Lubavitch movement, by the movement, through public media-print and broadcast journalism, books, film, and the like.